Given that Barack Obama spent the bulk of his childhood in Indonesia and Hawaii, America's 44th president is the first to be able to claim a degree of Asian heritage.

That pedigree will come in handy over the next week as Mr Obama attempts to deliver the message that “America is back” after years of perceived neglect during the two terms of George W. Bush.

White House officials stress that Mr Obama's biggest objective will be to reassure Asian countries that they are front and centre of America's vision, in contrast to the Bush years, when Washington often bypassed big Asian gatherings.

“The overarching theme is that America is a Pacific nation, it understands the importance of Asia in the 21st century and it is going to be very engaged on a whole series of issues that are critical for our prosperity and security,” said Ben Rhodes, a senior national security official.

Starting in Tokyo tomorrow, then at the Asia- Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in Singapore at the weekend before moving to the centrepiece of his trip in China for the first half of next week, Mr Obama will attempt to restore momentum to a series of complex but vital relationships. The trip concludes next Thursday in South Korea.

On each stop, Mr Obama will also try to navigate thorny bilateral and multilateral problems: in Japan over the Pentagon's unpopular plans to relocate the US Marine base to the northern part of Okinawa; in Singapore to reassure the sceptical 21-member Asia- Pacific trade group that the US remains committed to trade liberalisation; in China to try to win stronger help from Beijing on climate change, economic rebalancing, Afghanistan and Iran; and in South Korea to rekindle six-party efforts to shut down North Korea's nuclear weapons programme.

Underlying the whole trip, however, is a sharp dissonance between what is expected of Mr Obama in Asia and the very strict domestic limits on what the US president can offer. Earlier this week Max Baucus, the Democratic chairman of the Senate finance committee, articulated precisely what many Asians feel about the Obama administration in a statement urging the president to regain the initiative on trade.

“For the past 10 months the US has lacked a comprehensive trade agenda and that absence is palpable,” he said.

However, Mr Baucus does not speak for the majority of his fellow Democrats, many of whom are becoming ever more hostile to new trade deals, or ratification of existing ones, such as the 2007 US-South Korea free trade agreement.

In addition, Mr Obama's decision to slap import duties on Chinese tyre imports in September went down well on Capitol Hill.

With US unemployment now at more than 10 per cent following the sharp drop – from 17m to 12m – of US manufacturing jobs in the Bush years, Mr Obama will be hard pressed to come up with initiatives in Asia that do not provoke outrage back home. Given that the business of Asia is business, as the cliché goes, Mr Obama goes to Asia with one hand tied behind his back.

“The most valuable thing on the planet is access to the US market – and we've been giving it away for free,” says Leo Gerard, head of the United Steel Workers union, which was a strong backer of Mr Obama in the election. “The most important divide for President Obama to bridge is not between Asian governments and the US but between the US government and its working people. We cannot keep giving our jobs away to Asia.”